Marsalian fisherman who’s been with me since I poured bronze for the ram-spur, and others just as good, or just as deserving of life. But when a man has a spear right through his guts so that the head comes out the back Best he have brave friends.
The Aedui infantry on our side of the stream faded the moment it became clear that their noble cavalry wasn’t going to fight. We took eight of them, too — tired men who didn’t have the muscles to run away.
The enemy had about thirty dead and wounded and twenty captured. A dozen of the captured were cavalrymen. They couldn’t cross the gully to freedom, and Gaius closed the bridge, and Demetrios and I worked with Sekla to herd them into a circle. They were mostly very young men, and all the fight had gone out of them, and I think they’d have surrendered sooner except that they got the idea we were going to execute them.
Did they think we were fools?
We used them as hostages, of course. We sent the youngest, a boy of seventeen, up the ridge to tell his lord that we had them, and then we made camp. We spend two hours on our ditch and our abatis, and then we collapsed in exhaustion. A fight — even an easy fight — takes it out of you, and the affray at the bridge on the Rhodanus was a sharp fight with a bad bit.
The next morning, we rose and packed our animals carefully, and marched with a strong advance guard — twenty men. After all, we’d captured a dozen horses. And we now had a dozen men in fine scale shirts.
By evening, we were camping within bowshot of the walls of Ludunca. The town had hundreds of timber houses and some dozens of stone houses, as well as four temples and a stone outer wall. We paid a fine for camping in someone’s field.
Gwan and his Senones unpacked the donkeys and the horses and the carts, and turned them around for home. Their part was done. At Ludunca, all of our tin was loaded onto barges. These weren’t made of a single tree trunk like those on the Sequaana. These were made of planks — as few as three very wide planks, or as many as nine. The sides were formed of single, heavy planks that fitted perfectly to the strakes of the bottom. Again, the boats were designed to take the standard barrels, but could also hold our pigs of tin.
Vasilios was fascinated. He told us all, several times, that the way they built boats depended on the available timber. He was especially impressed with the way the Galles used iron nails to clench the timbers to cross supports — very alien to the Greek construction method, but very strong.
He showed me one in particular that impressed me. The floor of a particularly large and heavy barge had cross beams to support the side of the boards and to keep them together. These boards had holes drilled in them and then in the supports, and pegs of oak were driven into those holes, and then iron nails were driven into the pegs, forcefully expanding them against the wood around them. The result was watertight and as strong as — well, as iron. And oak.
We loaded for Marsala even while we negotiated with the local Aedui for the release of our hostages. They were all important young men — not the infantry, no one even wanted them back, but the horsemen. In the end, I released them all for a pound of gold and some casks of ale.
I don’t think I’ve mentioned that we figured out that Callum had traded us twelve casks of bee’s wax for a pig of tin. I had no idea if that was a fair trade, but people had begun to make offers on the bee’s wax already. Without Doola, I was helpless to guess the value. Demetrios said it would trade well in many places, because it was so clear and white.
I have to smile. I had a picture in my head of Arimnestos, the Killer of Men, standing in front of a group of unwed maidens — perhaps at the temple of Artmeis at Brauron. I was holding up a ball of pure white beeswax, and telling them that it was the very thing to use on their best white linen thread.
Well, I think it’s funny.
The trip down river from Ludunca was uneventful. We reached the Inner Sea at the old Phoneician port at Arla. I’m not ashamed to say that I threw myself down on the beach and kissed the sand and the water. I was not alone. We ran up and down the beach, and then we ran again, until the running became a kind of celebration.
The boatmen were cautious about the edge of the sea, but they got their barges all the way along the coast to Massalia, almost one hundred stades, poling along the beaches. It is a protected part of the sea, but it seemed dangerous to me, perhaps because I had been through so much that I feared the loss of everything at the very end.
But one fine day in late autumn — just the edge of winter, with a bitter wind blowing out of the west, and a chill in the air that could make a man ill — we sighted Tarsilla. People came down to the water’s edge, and we landed on the beach, landed our pigs of tin, our little remaining silver, our bee’s wax, Gallish wine, hides and all. We moved them all into Vasilios’s shed that he had used to protect our ship when he was building it.
We had a feast on the beach, and the next day we celebrated the Feast of Dionysus in style, with wine and song and even a play done by one of the teams of actors from Massalia.
Two more days, and Demetrios of Phokia arrives with sixty men and a pair of oxen to kill, and gave another feast for our return. We spent two days telling him of our travels.
He spent both days telling us of war with Carthage.
Carthage had struck at Sicily in our absence. And not just Sicily — the Carthaginians were using force to get absolute mastery of all the trade routes in the western Inner Sea. Carthage had been involved in wars on Sardinia for fifty years — and had squandered armies and fleets attempting to dominate the stiff necked peoples of the island. By the time Telesinus was Archon in Athens, Carthage had at last dominated the Sardana, and was now attempting to use her new ports to attack Greek colonies like Massalia — and Syracusa.
But the Greek world had not stood still during the year I had been away. Gelon, the Tyrant of Gela and Naxos, had seized power in Syracusa.
That was news. I knew a Sicilian Greek aristocrat named Gelon — in fact, I had enslaved him. It couldn’t be the same man — the Sicilian Tyrant had never been any man’s slave — but I wondered if my Gelon had made it home.
At any rate, Gelon — the tyrant — was unifying the Greek cities of Sicily and Magna Greca against Carthage. Not everyone joined him. Rich cities like Himera on Sicily and Reggium in southern Italy chose to remain independent.
Really, it was the Ionian Revolt played out in miniature. It had been going on for years — as one or another Greek state rose to prominence and led the resistance against Carthage, and was conquered or bought off, another would come. But Gelon of Gela — a right bastard, if Dionysius the Phocaean was to be believed — had at least achieved the building of an alliance.
I wondered what his conquest of Syracusa meant.
We were lying on the beach — it was still warm enough to be outside with a bonfire — eating beef and lobster. Dionysius the Phocaean was licking his teeth. ‘There is no side I want,’ he said. ‘I don’t want the Carthaginians to enslave me, and Gelon is a horror. He enslaved half of the free population of Syracusa — you know that?’
My blood ran cold.
‘Women, children — sold off or put in brothels. Men made into oarsmen, or forced labour on farms. Gelon won’t allow a lower class — a Thetis class. Claims they destabilize the state. He insists he’ll have only aristocrats and slaves, like Sparta.’ Dionysius picked his teeth and looked at me. ‘I don’t like either side.’
I lay on my straw paliase, using a metal pick to get the meat out of the body of a lobster and drinking wine. ‘I owe Carthage something. I’m of a mind to trade my share of the tin, take a ship while I have a crew — a fighting crew-’ I paused. I hadn’t been aware that this was my intention. But suddenly it was.
I nodded. ‘But first, I’m going to have Demetrios here go sell the tin, while I go back and find my friends,’ I said. ‘Doola, Daud, Sittonax, Alexandros — they’re probably right behind us on the road. And I owe something to young Gwan there.’
‘Winter will close the passes,’ Demetrios said. ‘And I won’t be selling any tin this winter, either.’
As if to prove him right, a cold gust of wind blew down off the mountains at our backs.
Part III
